Larkin unbuttoned his suit coat and rested his hands on his hips. He pushed Doyle’s whiskey voice to the back of his consciousness, letting it ebb and flow like the tides. Smooth. Soothing. A constant murmur that he could latch onto, the sort of white noise people used to help them fall asleep—a psychological addiction to a rich baritone. Larkin turned his face, closed his eyes, and soaked up the kisses of sunshine that peered through the boughs of the dogwood. He spun his mental Rolodex and let it stop on Niederman.

A lesser man would wrap the investigation here.

Let Niederman’s death succumb to and wallow in the same inactivity, the same injustice that had been served to his victims all these years.

Because who the fuck cared that a child molester and murderer was offed?

It was justice in its own right—a betterment for all of society.

But Everett Larkin had sworn an oath to uphold the constitutions of the United States and the state of New York to the best of his ability, and to allow vigilantism, to turn a blind eye to a perpetrated crime—to murder—was detrimental to his skills, his pride, his self-worth, and made him no better than the one who’d killed Niederman. That person was to be tried in a court of law by a jury of their peers, no matter what Larkin thought.

Besides, to investigate Niederman in death was to investigate Niederman in life, which would aid Larkin in identifying all of those lost children. And when justice was served and one by one their cases closed, he could shuttle those forgotten names and forgotten souls onto somewhere better. Where they would be remembered for who they were and not what they had become.

Reynold had claimed that Dicky, a longtime homeless man, had been someone Niederman had known since the community of pedophiles had interacted with each other on now-defunct internet forums. Hernandez had further confirmed this as fact when he claimed to have known Dicky since he was a kid—when both Jay and Marco were still alive.

Fast forward twenty-three years.

Alfred Niederman was murdered Sunday, May 10.

His body was discovered on Tuesday, May 19.

Megan had maintained she, and other youths who squatted at the Fifty-Seventh Street station, had last seen Dicky on Friday, which, because she’d been kidnapped Monday, May 18, would make his last appearance in the tunnels Friday, May 15. A full week after Hernandez had last seen him at St. Jude’s Mission.